Imagine being a 26-year-old Mormon guy appearing in your first professional musical in Sacramento when you get a phone call saying you’ve been cast in a new musical by Stephen Sondheim. Flash forward to 2022 and you are once again appearing in a Sondheim musical – the gender-bending revival of Company on Broadway. Between those years you’ve done other shows, fallen in love, had a son, created a popular Instagram account that shows your life as a father and landed a role in The Gilded Age. That’s just some of what Claybourne Elder explores in his cabaret show If The Stars Were Mine.
Elder is going to perform his show beginning tonight at the Samueli Theatre at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa. The show continues through Saturday, February 22nd. Next weekend he’ll be performing at Feinstein’s at the Nikko in San Francisco on February 28th and March 1st.
Last week I spoke with Elder about his show, being a father to his son, Bo (who appears in many of Elder’s instagram posts), his experiences with Sondheim and just how filthy If The Stars Were Mine is. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.
Q: Like anyone, you’ve grown and evolved since you first started doing this show, If the Stars Were Mine. How has the show grown and evolved since you first started performing it?
I started doing the show right after Company ended and I had done cabaret shows before. I was like, I want to do something different. I’m a writer, a storyteller and I kind of do stand-up stuff as well. So I was like, I’m going to start with what I want to say. I started writing and then I fit the songs in around what I wanted to say. It was a different process for me. There’s more talking than a cabaret show and there’s more singing than a stand-up show because there’d be no singing in a standup show.
This one is very personal to me. It has changed and grown a lot and really just clarified. It’s sometimes dirty, sometimes funny, hopefully very moving also in the end. Really it’s my favorite thing to do.
If you’ve been doing it for two years, do you still get moved by it?
It’s different every time I do it. It’s not like the material changes all that much. But, I share some things that I never thought I would share in front of people that are very deeply personal to me and will probably be deeply personally moving to me for my entire life. Some of the biggest and deepest things that have happened to me.
Your show on the website for Segerstrom is described as a “hilarious, heartfelt and surprisingly filthy evening.” Which is a great and truly provocative line. What do you want audiences to understand about you through this show that promises to explore “what exactly happens when you eat the body of Christ?”
I carefully crafted that little blurb because it’s not only for gay people. It is sometimes filthy. I do tell some dirty stories, but my dirty is probably not very dirty because I was raised a good little Mormon boy. I say surprisingly filthy because I think that people look at me and they’re like, what a nice gay ex-Mormon dad. You know, what a nice guy. And I am. But also, once you get to know me, I am sort of dark and twisted and messed up. I really wanted to share that with people, too.
You have a wonderful Instagram account. What I love most is that we really get to understand who you are as an artist and, most importantly, who you are as a father to your son, Bo. What does your Instagram tell us about you that is different than what your show does and vice versa?
Well, that’s very interesting. My Instagram account, I try to be very transparent. I try to not show very much of a filtered version of my life, per se. Like videos of Bo and I having conversations that I post. They’re just real things that have happened. I think that my show, I hope, is the same. I’ve never really thought about it that way. But, you know, they are both how I portray myself and and it is not a character version of me, it’s just me.
What have you learned about who you are as a man as a result of the questions that Bo asks you?
This is absolutely what I talk about in my show: what happens to you when suddenly you have someone who you love coming and asking you what your belief system is. I have these filmed conversations with him on the internet. It came about because my mom, when he was born, said take a million photos. Always take photos. Always take videos. You will never regret taking too many.
When he would ask a funny question, what I usually do is I just pull out my phone and set it up somewhere where I think it’ll capture us. And I’m like, Hey, I didn’t hear you. What did you say? And then he’ll ask the question again. Like, why do we celebrate Christmas? And then we have a little chat about it. When you have to explain Christmas to a little kid for the first time, you’re like, I don’t know, what do I think Christmas is? And you really do things that you just take for granted or don’t process anymore.
You have to reprocess and make decisions about how you feel about them and what you believe about them. That is a really profound, challenging, entertaining and thrilling thing to do.
How does a show like Company, that started in 1970, resonate with you both as an audience member and as somebody who got to play the ultimate himbo in the show?
It’s fascinating to me that Steve wrote it when he was as young as he did and didn’t know what it was like to be married. He writes about marriage like someone who is really intimately understanding of it. Especially for people who’ve been married for a long time. It’s really incredibly insightful.
This new version that we did with the gender swap and setting it in modern day, I think it spoke to a whole generation of people. I think that the messages were just as timely. There aren’t a lot of characters written like Andy because they’re written for women. That’s a trope for women. It’s not as much a trope for men. As a little gay kid, I wanted to play Belle in [Beauty and the Beast], I wanted to be The Little Mermaid. I wanted to be the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods. Getting to actually gender bend one of your favorite roles on Broadway was totally just a dream come true.
For those who think that Company was your first experience with Sondheim, we can take you back to Sacramento in 2008. You were part of the ensemble of Sweeney Todd – your first job. What stands out to you about that experience with Sondheim? Did you ever imagine that you would have the collaborations you would ultimately come to have with him?
Here’s what happened. I moved to New York. I was auditioning. The first job I really booked was that I spent a month in Sacramento doing two plays, My Fair Lady and Sweeney Todd. Just in the ensemble of both shows. But before I left town, I auditioned for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular and got cast. I was going to be one of the Christmas singers in the show. I was like, my gosh, I have a job for Christmas.
But I also auditioned for Road Show at the Public Theater for a job that I would never get in a leading role in a new Stephen Sondheim show. There was no way I was going to get it. I was literally just some kid off the street. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a manager. I didn’t have anything. While I was doing Sweeney Todd at Sacramento Music Circus, the casting director from the Public Theater called me up and was like, I don’t know if I’m supposed to be calling you directly, but I’m just letting you know that we’re casting you in the show. You booked it and and you’re going to be working with Stephen Sondheim. I didn’t believe it. I thought that until the first day of rehearsal when I was like, really? So it’s crazy that I was doing a regional ensemble version of one of his shows and then got to go and sit in rehearsal with him every day for two months.
A couple of years ago I spoke with Gavin Creel. We talked we talked about his experiences in Bounce at the Goodman Theater, which was the first production of the show that became Road Show. When I asked him what stood out about that time. He talked about Sondheim and Hal Prince. And he said, “I watched them in the mud. I got to watch them trying to make the lotus blossom.” You were at the end of that process. Were they still in the mud? Did the lotus blossom?
John Doyle took over directing that show and they completely reworked it. Bounce was a big Broadway musical with huge sets, costumes, ensemble, all this stuff. John Doyle decided he was going to do it totally differently. And Steve just trusted him. It was interesting to see him offer up himself and his work to somebody else’s vision of how it would be. I think he made something really beautiful and distilled down a story into something really nice.
To have come, as you did, from the ensemble of Sweeney Todd, were you pinching yourself? Do you have a database of all these incredible stories and experiences that you had in that process?
I kept a journal because I knew this is special. I will want to remember this my whole life. And the answer is I’m still pinching myself. You say that to me and I’m like, my gosh, I can’t believe that happened to me. I’m just some kid from Utah. My dad was a construction worker. My mom was a teacher. There’s no reason I should be on Broadway. I think it says so much more about them than it does my talent that this unknown person is the one. That’s who we’re looking for. Were there people who could sing it better? Sure. Were there people more famous? But they were like, whatever the quality is we’re looking for, it’s that guy. And we’re going to trust that he’s going to do it. It set me off on a course for my career; for the kind of performer I would be for the rest of my life.
On your Instagram account on April 27th, 2024, you described yourself as an “irrationally optimistic person.” In a world that seems to embrace chaos more and more by every day, how do you maintain that optimism? How do you share that in your shows? And most importantly, how do you keep Bo, if not at least sheltered from that chaos, at least protected from it for now?
This is a hard time to be an irrationally optimistic person. It is hard to maintain that. But, I do and I always will. Ultimately, I just believe that people will do the right thing even when it seems like they won’t and they don’t always like it. Trusting the best intentions of people, maybe not every single person, maybe some leaders, maybe not. I try to approach interactions with people in that way. Even with people who really disagree with me or don’t like me very much for who I am or how I live my life. I always think that there’s a human level in which we can connect with everyone.
What I talk about in my show is kindness and the nature of it and the nature of goodness. With Bo, I try to be honest with him about everything without scaring him because he’s seven. But I do talk to him about the changes in our government and some of the challenges that might arise because of it for our family. Without saying big scary things, too, because I do think it’s important he knows and I don’t want to lie to him about that. Yeah, it’s a challenging time, but I do think that there are also a lot of things to be optimistic about.
To watch the full interview with Claybourne Elder, please go HERE.
Main Photo: Claybourne Elder (Courtesy Segerstrom Center for the Arts)